| > I guess it depends on what that means. A quick Google suggests that about 22% of Americans are multi-lingual, and roughly 8% of Americans do not have English as their dominant language (though I suspect that entirely non-English speaking Americans are at least one order of magnitude less). I think only about 2% of countries in the world don't have an official language (America among them), and yet about 50% of the world is multi-lingual, so having an official language doesn't seem like an obstacle for other governments when it comes to support. I suspect that the lack of of national language has more to do with the power struggle between the federal government and state governments then any issue, which is why I find this latest executive order quite baffling (for a party that is in the process of dismantling federal government, this is very much a federal power grab). With all of that being said, I see it both as a recognition of the status quo, and a commitment to what is one of the greatest strengths of the United States (a single-language, single-currency market). Our largest economic rival (China) also has an enormous single-language, single-currency market, but that strength is largely focused inwards, since the use of a non-romanised language makes it very difficult for the non-Chinese reading population to adop sub-parts of the Chinese language. |